FTE and Proration examples in Compensation

FTE

The FTE (Full Time Equivalent) is the quotient of an employee’s scheduled hours divided by the hours for a full-time workweek.

What is the reason for the FTE ?

For employees who do not work full-time if their full time annual salary is stored (as per the leading practice in terms of Data Migration to Employee Central’s Comp Info portlet) then NOT adjusting their salary range by the FTE could cause erroneous calculations with regards to range penetration and compa-ratio which could result in incorrect guideline recommendations.

Let’s take an example based on the data for Ethan Howard in the screenshots below.

In SAP Compensation leading practices, merit guidelines are based on Compa Ratio ranges combined with Performance Rating where :

• An employee with 102.94% in Compa Ratio and a rating of Exceeds Expectations would get a guideline of 3% to 4%.
• An employee with 205.88% in Compa Ratio and a rating of Exceeds Expectations would get a guideline of 1% to 3% (due to the already high Compa Ratio).

This example shows us how the FTE makes sure that for the same Performance Rating employees working full-time get a higher guideline recommendation than employees working part-time.

How is it built ?

In SuccessFactors the FTE is a standard field built in the Job Info portlet of Employee Central (EC) and used in the standard calculation of the standard Compa Ratio and Range Penetration fields (FTE impact on Compa Ratio and Range Penetration can be removed through “Ignore FTE during Compa Ratio and Range Penetration Calculation” checkbox in Company System and Logo Settings since 1H 2022 – ECT-175722).

Here are some examples from the Compensation Information portlet of Employee Central :

Compensation worksheets can be aligned with Employee Central’s behavior through the addition of the standard field FTE below :

Once added the FTE value will impact both the Pay Range display and the Compa Ratio calculation on the Compensation worksheets just like in EC (the only difference being that in EC the ranges aren’t already impacted by the FTE like on the comp worksheet, instead the detail of the calculation [Pay Range midpoint * FTE] is visible – please see screenshots above).

• Before :

• After :

If we don’t want the display of the Compa Ratio to be impacted by the FTE but would like to get to a similar outcome in terms of salary increase for the employee we can keep the FTE standard field in Design Worksheet and add the following XML tag (not available through Admin UI, only through XML change) :

• isActualSalaryImported=”false”

In that case the Current Salary of the employee also gets adjusted by the FTE (on top of the Salary Ranges which already were), hence the Compa Ratio is showing as if there was no FTE impact BUT the Recommendation amounts in standard recommendation column shrink as a consequence of the salary being reduced by the FTE. By impacting the salary by the FTE the individual budget envelope for the team member will also get adjusted.

Finally, the standard FTE field in Compensation cannot be controlled by Number Format rules : it will always display the same exact number of decimals than what was loaded either in EC or in the User Directory File (rounding or truncating isn’t possible on the standard FTE field of the Compensation worksheet).

PRORATION

Proration is a feature only available in Compensation templates that adjusts Guidelines, Recommendations and Budgets based on the time the employee spent in the company during the Fiscal Year considered for planning.

How is it different from the FTE ?

• The FTE captures a permanent part-time situation with ties to payroll.
• The Proration feature captures something that happened only over the past fiscal year, for example an employee who usually works full-time but took a 6 months sabbatical during the fiscal year considered for salary review is only entitled to 50% of this upcoming salary increase.

Here is an example of Proration in a Compensation worksheet :

• Before :

• After 

How it it built ?

There are 2 ways to set up Proration in a Compensation template :

• By Percentage : from a field in EC or an MDF object (field of type String) mapped to the standard Proration field in Design Worksheet (field Id = proration)

• By Dates : dates can be defined in the compensation template settings as per the screenshot below. The worksheet will compare the date from EC feeding the salaryProratingStartDate standard field from Design Worksheet (which can be mapped to any Date fields in EC) against the Proration settings dates entered by Comp Admin in the Plan Setup > Settings page and from there the system will calculate a percentage and populate it into the standard Proration field in Design worksheet. Note : the salaryProratingEndDate field doesn’t require any mapping on it for Proration % to be calculated correctly.

How to determine which one to use ?

It really depends on whether the Employee Central configuration already has a field that captures Proration as a percentage or not. If not, then using dates may be easier as Date of Last Hire is usually an information that is captured in Employee Central. However Proration setup using dates does not support cases where the employee starts and stops work multiple times in the same compensation period (it only compares one date against a range of dates to return a percentage). In that scenario, it would be best to calculate the proration outside the system and import the calculated percent.

Do most customers use Proration ?

No. In my own experience and the experience of my colleague who consolidated the knowledge for this post most customers do not use Proration (however they do use FTE) and instead of Proration they like to fully exclude employees who were hired or rehired past a certain date (which is a little bit of a different case than proration). They do prorate for bonus however by using the employee history eligibility rules in Variable Pay.

What are known limitations or useful knowledge ?

• Percentages in the Proration field can be higher than 100% only if the following tag in the XML of the template (currently not supported through Admin UI) is set to True : canExceedReviewPeriod=”true”.
• Budgets are not automatically Prorated unless a specific setting is selected in the Budget settings :

What is “Raise Prorating” ?

If we don’t want guidelines and recommendations to be automatically adjusted but would like to get to a similar outcome in terms of salary increase we can use the Raise Prorating feature which only impacts the Total Increase standard field as per the explanations and example below.

To use Raise Prorating, we need to remove the standard Prorating fields and instead add the Total Raise Prorating standard fields below. Raise Prorating cannot be applied to Budgets like standard Prorating can and will need to be manually added to the formula of each Budget envelope.

Use Case around Raise Prorating (credit : David Somelofske, SAP)

• The customer requirement is to use raise prorating, import the value and then edit allowing for proration over 100%.
• Another important requirement is that raise prorating should only apply to merit and not to any other standard recommendation column (promo, lumpsum, extra…)

Solution :

• Make the xml changes highlighted in the screenshot below.

• Use Field Based Permission groups to limit the edit to comp admins and have the planners being read only.
• Finally, make sure to set the Total Raise Prorating standard field as editable (Read Only is No) and (if needed) set validation as per the screenshot below:

As a conclusion one important thing to focus on when implementing these two features is to carefully look at all the custom formulas where these two FTE and Proration standard fields should be added as a multiplier to keep an overall consistency in the design of the worksheet. This is particularly true for budgets envelopes or spent formula.

Thank you and please comment if you have come across additional cases on these topics.

Credits go to Skip Jones (SAP) for consolidating the knowledge that helped in creating this post.